A friend of mine is learning to play piano. As his left hand hesitated on the keys, I shared a quick method of reading the sheet music, recalled from childhood lessons: “All cows eat grass.” From the bottom up, the notes in between the spaces on the bass clef are A-C-E-G. Knowing the phrase, you could talk your way up the staff until you had identified the correct note to hit. Only, it struck me right then how incorrect the acronym has become.

Not all cows eat grass nowadays. More commonly, they eat corn. Cows have not been evolved to digest corn, but it’s become the basic feed of industrial agriculture livestock. And, most of that corn has been genetically modified.

Not everyone has, or even wants, an iPhone. For you, we have the original (actually, the all-new, updated, revised), hard copy, two-kilo, 1044-page bright red, much beloved How to Cook Everything. Right. The Book. Sign up for our newsletter: we’re giving away three copies to randomly selected winners, today. (We print out the new subscribers, paste the page to a wall, and throw darts. Natch.)

My Times piece on making your own sushi – without seafood – is right here. But here’s the exclusive look at my deformed sushi, and I can tell you that two of us ate about twice the amount you see on the large platter here. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It matters what it tastes like. And with good nori, umeboshi, tofu, and some other traditional Japanese ingredients like prosciutto, roasted red peppers, and chopped cooked chard… it was quite a feast.

[Ed Schneider is a friend of mine, a contributor to the Times and the Washington Post, and among the best home cooks I’ve ever known. I love him, even if he does write about ramps. I remain unconvinced, but I’m going to try it – next spring. – mb]

I happen to agree with New York’s Newspaper of Record that Motorino’s is the best pizza in New York. I haven’t actually been to many of its competitors, but, since for Jackie and me pizza is a meal rather than a hobby, I’m happy to accept that as fact. Anyway, it is wonderful pizza.

Right at the very beginning of spring, however, they served a ramp pizza that we didn’t much like. For one thing, the chopped ramps were chewy and harsh-tasting, and for another it was a tomato-sauce-based pie, which I thought was a bad idea – I rarely like greens cooked with tomato, though I’m more open to the concept than I used to be. When I told Mark about this, he dared me (his word) to devise a ramp pizza that wasn’t a bad idea. I’m not one to rise to a dare merely to save face: I’ll do it only if I’m confident I can actually perform the stunt in question.

We’re giving away five of the new (best-selling and widely praised) How to Cook Everything iApps today. Just sign up for our newsletter (over there, to the left) and you’ll be entered in our (random) drawing. And check back tomorrow, and later in the week – we’ll be giving away more stuff soon.

[Paula Crossfield is a founding editor of Civil Eats, a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, a contributing producer at WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show, and an avid cook and urban gardener. (I’ve seen her rooftop garden, and it’s amazing.) Follow her on Twitter.]

With one in three children (and one in two children of color) overweight or obese in this country, the health of America’s kids is under the microscope and, for the first time in our history, children born now will not live as long as their parents. Michelle Obama has launched her Let’s Move campaign and Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution brought the school cafeteria to television. But as Oliver’s program showed, one of the biggest barriers to changing kids’ eating is a lack of labor and expertise.

[John Thorne and his wife, Matt, live in Northampton MA, where they cook in an apartment kitchen. They are perhaps best known for their irregularly published food newsetter, Simple Cooking, which has been chugging along now for thirty years(!). Their books include Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig, Pot On The Fire, and most recently Mouth Wide Open. It is perhaps worth noting that I idolize Mr. Thorne, have for as long as he and Matt have produced Simple Cooking, and am ecstatic to see his posts on markbittman.com. When you read this piece you’ll see why.– mb]

After my father died, I used to go to Maine twice a year for a week-long visit with my mother, first at the family home in Searsmont and then at a retirement community in Belfast. There, she was required to eat supper at the community dining hall a certain number of days a month. But she didn’t really enjoy that, and not because of the quality of the food (although she complained about that, too). She liked to move through the day at her own rhythm, which meant lunch was often eaten around three in the afternoon, and she wasn’t in the mood to walk down to the dining hall two hours later. She’d much rather eat supper at her own place … around eight in the evening.

This was the case even though by then various frailties had reduced her cooking to preparing some vegetables to accompany the night’s frozen dinner. Of course, I tried to get her to let me cook for her. She did allow this but showed no enthusiasm for my doing so, despite the fact that she often seemed to enjoy what I made. Finally, I got the hint. I gave up, and she and I would settle down in front of the television, each with our own frozen dinner (or, in my case, two frozen dinners — and I usually hedged my bet by having two different kinds). Continue reading →

More than a year ago, I gathered a small team of geniuses (self not included) with the idea of re-launching markbittman.com as something interesting and different. And it was successful in a limited and static way: we put up some recipes, pictures, and videos, we launched a discussion (or at least a description) of Food Matters, and we appealed to visitors to join us in thinking up ways to change the way America eats. And lots of people visited.

All of that is still here: You can browse recipes, pictures, and videos, which will change periodically; you can sign up for a newsletter (which we’ll try to send out with some regularity); you can learn more about Food Matters, How to Cook Everything, and some of the other things I do. Continue reading →

[Pam Anderson is a veteran food writer and cook book author, a colleague of mine from the old Cook’s magazine (the predecessor of Cook’s Illustrated) – there are times I feel like she and I learned to cook together, because our styles are so similar. She blogs weekly with daughters Maggy and Sharon at threemanycooks.com–an ongoing lively conversation about food and life. -mb]

Most of the time it’s fun to be a food writer. Sometimes it’s not. Like last Friday when David and I went to a matinee of Date Night. Despite bad reviews we refused to believe Steve Carrell and Tina Fey wouldn’t be hilarious together.

We got out of the movie about 5:30 and auto-piloted home to make dinner from a week’s worth of recipe experiments languishing in the fridge. We’re usually very good at turning these little tidbits into a feast, but sometimes I just wish we were the normal couple for whom dinner-and-a-movie means going out. Continue reading →

[Barry Estabrook, the former food and politics writer at Gourmet, blogs at www.politicsoftheplate.com. His story about the horrors of labor and Florida-grown tomatoes was among the best of 2009, and it isn’t only me who thinks so – he won a Beard award last night. On Twitter, he regularly serves up snippets about food and politics @Barry_Estabrook. And here on markbittman.com, he will be contributing a weekly roundup on newsworthy food events. – mb]

Strike Three for Atlantic Bluefin

Endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna can’t seem to catch a break. Strike one came late last year when the International Commission on the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas voted to allow fishermen to take 13,500 metric tons of tuna this year, a number that the commission’s own scientists said left the majestic fish with only a 50-50 chance of avoiding extinction. Strike two was thrown in March by the Committee on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) when they buckled under Japanese lobbying and voted not to give the species protection.

Last week, it was British Petroleum’s turn to deal a devastating blow to Atlantic bluefins with oil leaking from its sunken drilling platform off Louisiana. The Gulf of Mexico is one of only two spawning grounds for the fish and it happens that now is peak time for mating, said Chris Mann of the Pew Environmental Trust in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Fortunately, the heart of the breeding grounds lies southwest of the oil slick, but Mann worried that prevailing winds might blow bluefin eggs into the contaminated area.

Genetically Modified Justice a la Clarence Thomas

Last month, the Supreme Court began hearings on a case that could be pivotal to both sides of the GMO argument. In 2007, a lower court issued an injunction against planting genetically modified alfalfa produced by Monsanto after determining that the United States Department of Agriculture had approved its use without sufficient scrutiny. Monsanto is appealing the injunction.

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer recused himself because his brother was a judge in the lower court case. Fair enough. But conservative judge Clarence Thomas, who did legal work for Monsanto back in the 1970s, declined to recuse himself. Oral arguments last week indicated that Clarence’s conservative colleagues on the bench were not buying the argument that the GM alfalfa could contaminate nearby non-GMO alfalfa. A decision is expected this summer.

Coke to Shareholder Group: Things Go Better with BPA

Last month 22 percent of Coca-Cola’s shareholders supported a resolution asking the soft drink company to disclose how it is dealing with concerns about the safety of bisphenol A, a plastic coating used to line the inside of cans. The company refused to provide the asked-for information, saying that it would not be “useful to our shareholders,” according to Food Quality News. The company said it would continue to take its guidance about the chemical’s safety from regulatory agencies.

Maybe the Coke execs should take a look at the latest information from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which recently ordered new studies into the chemical’s safety. In a January update to on BPA, the FDA said that it shared “the perspective of the National Toxicology Program that recent studies provide reason for some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children.”

It also said, “In addition, FDA is supporting reasonable steps to reduce human exposure to BPA, including actions by industry.”

Obama’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy on GMO Foods

An obscure unit of the United Nations called Codex begins meetings this week in Quebec City, and its deliberations could determine whether food processors who trade internationally will be permitted to say on labels that their products are free of GMO ingredients.

That’s right. The Obama administration is pushing a position first articulated by the Bush Whitehouse that foods sold internationally should not be labeled “No GMOs” even if the statement is true. The administration claims that telling the public the truth about GMOs is “false, misleading, or deceptive.” Their somewhat convoluted reasoning: there is no difference between GMO and non-GMO food and telling the truth might make consumers think there is. (Photograph by iStockphoto)